Friam

Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

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gepr

Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
http://www.posteriorscience.net/?p=206&imm_mid=0e370a&cmp=em-prog-na-na-newsltr_20160507

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⛧ glen

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Gary Schiltz-4

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

In the words of the (in)famous Ross Perot, "Now, that's just sad."

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 1:57 PM, glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
http://www.posteriorscience.net/?p=206&imm_mid=0e370a&cmp=em-prog-na-na-newsltr_20160507

--
⛧ glen

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Roger Critchlow-2

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

I think it's pretty funny. The singularity happened before the millennium, when our libraries outgrew our ability to thoroughly test or understand them. In mere decades the artificial universe, starting from nothing, had become as mysterious as reality.

-- rec --

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 3:18 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

In the words of the (in)famous Ross Perot, "Now, that's just sad."

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 1:57 PM, glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
http://www.posteriorscience.net/?p=206&imm_mid=0e370a&cmp=em-prog-na-na-newsltr_20160507

--
⛧ glen

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

In the early days of Linux there was a period where they fastest way to figure out what was going on was to grab the source and study it. Contrast that with the current world of Stack Exchange and Google. There’s enough information out there that I suspect many people may never learn to do careful analysis. They can get by on poke and prod, and the industry drivers for intellectual property reinforces that behavior. Not that anyone really is “taught” to program -- at least that is worth hiring -- but it is sad to see computer science diluted in this way. I’ve helped someone through the current Harvard CS-50 curriculum and, no, SICP it ain’t.

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Monday, May 09, 2016 1:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

-- rec --

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 3:18 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

In the words of the (in)famous Ross Perot, "Now, that's just sad."

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 1:57 PM, glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
http://www.posteriorscience.net/?p=206&imm_mid=0e370a&cmp=em-prog-na-na-newsltr_20160507

--
⛧ glen

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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gepr

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

There is (at least in me) an ongoing brawl between (at least) 2 homunculi: the one that embraces novel situations where I have zero knowledge or control and have to "live in the present" versus the one that embraces knowledge and control. As I age, the latter usually has the upper hand. (During chemo, I found myself shying away from experiences I would have previously launched into without thought. And it was all "I told you so" after a horrific sunburn I got at one point ... "use sunblock or stay in the shade while they're poisoning you", it said ... Bah!)

And this mailing list might well provide an interesting opportunity for such contrast ... being seemingly populated mostly by old people (where the latter homunculus likely wins more) but orbiting the concept of complexity (where control and understanding are rare). The former homunculus would die off if we didn't feed it at least sporadically.

So, I'm glad it's all peek&poke these days. It means we're builing shoulders on which later generations stand. The opposite situation would be _sad_, say if everyone had to learn quantum mechanics just to add numbers together ... or if everyone had to know how to surface mount with a hot plate in order to post to Facebook ... well, OK, that might be a good thing, actually ... but you get my point.

On 05/09/2016 02:47 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

> In the early days of Linux there was a period where they fastest way to figure out what was going on was to grab the source and study it. Contrast that with the current world of Stack Exchange and Google. There’s enough information out there that I suspect many people may never learn to do careful analysis. They can get by on poke and prod, and the industry drivers for intellectual property reinforces that behavior. Not that anyone really is “taught” to program -- at least that is worth hiring -- but it is sad to see computer science diluted in this way. I’ve helped someone through the current Harvard CS-50 curriculum and, no, SICP it ain’t.
>
> On 05/09/2016 12:29 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
>> I think it's pretty funny. The singularity happened before the millennium, when our libraries outgrew our ability to thoroughly test or understand them. In mere decades the artificial universe, starting from nothing, had become as mysterious as reality.
>>
>>
>> On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 3:18 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>>>
>>> In the words of the (in)famous Ross Perot, "Now, that's just sad."
>>>
>>> On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 1:57 PM, glen <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
>>>> http://www.posteriorscience.net/?p=206&imm_mid=0e370a&cmp=em-prog-na-na-newsltr_20160507

--
⛧ glen

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

"So, I'm glad it's all peek&poke these days. It means we're builing shoulders on which later generations stand. The opposite situation would be _sad_, say if everyone had to learn quantum mechanics just to add numbers together ... or if everyone had to know how to surface mount with a hot plate in order to post to Facebook ... well, OK, that might be a good thing, actually ... but you get my point."

One can learn to program in, say, Python without understanding a given machine instruction set. One can even learn a subset, and have a correct understanding of some of its syntax and semantics and little or no understanding of other parts. That doesn't mean that learning the rest is pointless, or that learning a machine language couldn't give a Python programmer deeper and useful insight into why some constructs are slow and others are fast. Or that learning about digital circuit design couldn't give insight into what makes a machine instruction set energy efficient. Or that learning quantum mechanics couldn't give some insight into what makes circuits work the way they do. All these tools can be useful and the connections between them are some of the most interesting and useful things to know. This trend toward "industry relevant" knowledge is just to say the graph should be chopped up into consumable sound bites without regard to their coherence or utility for learning
other things.
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gepr

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

You're dancing around the fundamental point: Can abstraction layers be closures? And that's the essence of complexity theory, the study of what and how some thing is reducible to the inner layers (or what and how expands to the outer layers). Can you really understand Go just by knowing the rules? Or can you understand it without knowing the rules, just knowing possible configurations? The bias in Western culture seems to lie in the forward map. We tend to have a deep desire to build everything from 1st principles, axioms. (And even when we're fundamentally ignorant, we pretend at understanding the principles.) It's not enough to be an artisan. You have to be a scientist.

So, your qualifier, without regard to coherence or extension, is over-simplification. What's actually happening is specialization, niche-filling ... the same thing that's been happening the whole time. And it is definitely _not_ without regard. It may be systemic or evolutionary (so that no single mind understands what's happening). But to assert that there is no order or pattern to specialization seems wrong (at least too strong).

On 05/09/2016 03:37 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> One can learn to program in, say, Python without understanding a given machine instruction set. One can even learn a subset, and have a correct understanding of some of its syntax and semantics and little or no understanding of other parts. That doesn't mean that learning the rest is pointless, or that learning a machine language couldn't give a Python programmer deeper and useful insight into why some constructs are slow and others are fast. Or that learning about digital circuit design couldn't give insight into what makes a machine instruction set energy efficient. Or that learning quantum mechanics couldn't give some insight into what makes circuits work the way they do. All these tools can be useful and the connections between them are some of the most interesting and useful things to know. This trend toward "industry relevant" knowledge is just to say the graph should be chopped up into consumable sound bites without regard to their coherence or utility for learnin
g other things.

--
⛧ glen

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

If you have a closure over the whole universe and you are given one knob to turn, and once doing so out pops a new projection of the world you can see, then you 1) don't necessarily see the whole universe, but 2) can potentially be a specialist in the things that are observable in that projection. The part I don’t like in this picture is that the niche-fillers start to fancy the idea there are different universes popping out the closure and see no need to reconcile them. They see N vectors instead of one eigenvector.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, May 09, 2016 5:00 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

You're dancing around the fundamental point: Can abstraction layers be closures? And that's the essence of complexity theory, the study of what and how some thing is reducible to the inner layers (or what and how expands to the outer layers). Can you really understand Go just by knowing the rules? Or can you understand it without knowing the rules, just knowing possible configurations? The bias in Western culture seems to lie in the forward map. We tend to have a deep desire to build everything from 1st principles, axioms. (And even when we're fundamentally ignorant, we pretend at understanding the principles.) It's not enough to be an artisan. You have to be a scientist.

So, your qualifier, without regard to coherence or extension, is over-simplification. What's actually happening is specialization, niche-filling ... the same thing that's been happening the whole time. And it is definitely _not_ without regard. It may be systemic or evolutionary (so that no single mind understands what's happening). But to assert that there is no order or pattern to specialization seems wrong (at least too strong).

On 05/09/2016 03:37 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> One can learn to program in, say, Python without understanding a given machine instruction set. One can even learn a subset, and have a correct understanding of some of its syntax and semantics and little or no understanding of other parts. That doesn't mean that learning the rest is pointless, or that learning a machine language couldn't give a Python programmer deeper and useful insight into why some constructs are slow and others are fast. Or that learning about digital circuit design couldn't give insight into what makes a machine instruction set energy efficient. Or that learning quantum mechanics couldn't give some insight into what makes circuits work the way they do. All these tools can be useful and the connections between them are some of the most interesting and useful things to know. This trend toward "industry relevant" knowledge is just to say the graph should be chopped up into consumable sound bites without regard to their coherence or utility for learnin
g other things.

--
⛧ glen

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Roger Critchlow-2

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

I've done a completely "off my lawn" thing over the past few weeks. Playing Mahjong solitaire on Ubuntu is one of my vices, but I don't like the way the supplied program works in many ways. At least twice I've downloaded the source for gnome-mahjongg and looked at it until my eyes started bleeding and gave up. It's a gnome application and, furthermore, it's a gnome-game application, its source code is not its source code, it's source code is a specialization of a framework that's a specialization of a framework.

I've written my own version of mahjong in Tcl, Tk, and Snit. The entire source, including the svg for the tile set (which I stole from gnome-mahjongg and rewrote), comes to 3382 lines of code as of right now. Tcl is the other scripting language that isn't Perl and isn't Python and isn't Ruby. Tk is the user interface toolkit written for Tcl to prove that there could be a one line "hello world" progam for X windows, which subsequently has become available on Windows, Mac, Android, Perl, Python, and Ruby. Snit is a pure Tcl object extension for Tcl, that also allows you to extend Tk widgets.

It's not really a fair comparison, since I left out all the layouts and tile sets that I don't use, and I haven't even implemented everything I planned to do, and I didn't even plan to implement it all, and everything doesn't work right, either. None the less, I can play Mahjongg solitaire with my 3382 line Tcl/Tk/Snit script, and the source tree for gnome-majongg-3.20.0 is 19.5 Mbytes and 576 files or directories.

http://github.com/recri/mahjong, I think it may be a better program if I purposely leave some bugs in it,

-- rec --

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 6:37 PM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

"So, I'm glad it's all peek&poke these days. It means we're builing shoulders on which later generations stand. The opposite situation would be _sad_, say if everyone had to learn quantum mechanics just to add numbers together ... or if everyone had to know how to surface mount with a hot plate in order to post to Facebook ... well, OK, that might be a good thing, actually ... but you get my point."

One can learn to program in, say, Python without understanding a given machine instruction set. One can even learn a subset, and have a correct understanding of some of its syntax and semantics and little or no understanding of other parts. That doesn't mean that learning the rest is pointless, or that learning a machine language couldn't give a Python programmer deeper and useful insight into why some constructs are slow and others are fast. Or that learning about digital circuit design couldn't give insight into what makes a machine instruction set energy efficient. Or that learning quantum mechanics couldn't give some insight into what makes circuits work the way they do. All these tools can be useful and the connections between them are some of the most interesting and useful things to know. This trend toward "industry relevant" knowledge is just to say the graph should be chopped up into consumable sound bites without regard to their coherence or utility for learning
other things.

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Russell Standish-2

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

TCL/Tk, eh? Minsky is an graphically-based open-source dynamical
systems simulator I've mostly written using TCL/Tk that weighs in
around 10K lines. I've often fantasised about porting it to a
different toolkit, one that supports web browsers, and/or tablets. Qt
being one possibility.

Remind me not to use Gnome if at all possible. Bits of gnome are used
in Minsky, for doing things like font and SVG rendering, but used
reluctantly, because those APIs are just plain ugly, obviously written
by someone with a disdain for the C++ way of doing things.

Cheers

On Mon, May 09, 2016 at 07:47:01PM -0400, Roger Critchlow wrote:

> I've done a completely "off my lawn" thing over the past few weeks.
> Playing Mahjong solitaire on Ubuntu is one of my vices, but I don't like
> the way the supplied program works in many ways. At least twice I've
> downloaded the source for gnome-mahjongg and looked at it until my eyes
> started bleeding and gave up. It's a gnome application and, furthermore,
> it's a gnome-game application, its source code is not its source code, it's
> source code is a specialization of a framework that's a specialization of a
> framework.
>
> I've written my own version of mahjong in Tcl, Tk, and Snit. The entire
> source, including the svg for the tile set (which I stole from
> gnome-mahjongg and rewrote), comes to 3382 lines of code as of right now.
> Tcl is the other scripting language that isn't Perl and isn't Python and
> isn't Ruby. Tk is the user interface toolkit written for Tcl to prove that
> there could be a one line "hello world" progam for X windows, which
> subsequently has become available on Windows, Mac, Android, Perl, Python,
> and Ruby. Snit is a pure Tcl object extension for Tcl, that also allows
> you to extend Tk widgets.
>
> It's not really a fair comparison, since I left out all the layouts and
> tile sets that I don't use, and I haven't even implemented everything I
> planned to do, and I didn't even plan to implement it all, and everything
> doesn't work right, either. None the less, I can play Mahjongg solitaire
> with my 3382 line Tcl/Tk/Snit script, and the source tree for
> gnome-majongg-3.20.0 is 19.5 Mbytes and 576 files or directories.
>
> http://github.com/recri/mahjong, I think it may be a better program if I
> purposely leave some bugs in it,
>

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellow [hidden email]
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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gepr

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Yes, I agree. I was going to be cantankerous and respond with something about imperfect closure and the "openness" of all processes. But this article brings me back to a steady irritant:

Are our smartphones afflicting us all with symptoms of ADHD?
https://theconversation.com/are-our-smartphones-afflicting-us-all-with-symptoms-of-adhd-58330

The inability to "do analysis" or for deep thought may well simply be a symptom of the larger issue of attention-spreading (for lack of a better term). There seems to be a dichotomy between depth- vs. breadth-first attention at the root of the problem Sussman bemoaned. Us old people (well, geeks anyway) tend toward depth-first ... or at least depth-preferred ... attention, whereas the younger ones tend toward breadth-preference. You don't have to know _about_ the incident things, you only need to know _of_ them. You can have whole conversations simply mentioning various things without discussing any single thing in any depth.

There's a deep theme, here somewhere ... oops, my phone just dinged.

On 05/09/2016 04:26 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> If you have a closure over the whole universe and you are given one knob to turn, and once doing so out pops a new projection of the world you can see, then you 1) don't necessarily see the whole universe, but 2) can potentially be a specialist in the things that are observable in that projection. The part I don’t like in this picture is that the niche-fillers start to fancy the idea there are different universes popping out the closure and see no need to reconcile them. They see N vectors instead of one eigenvector.

--
⛧ glen

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

I like Knuth's take on it..

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

Most us have to stay on top of things, though. Hopefully, though, it is not the only thing.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2016 9:34 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

Yes, I agree. I was going to be cantankerous and respond with something about imperfect closure and the "openness" of all processes. But this article brings me back to a steady irritant:

Are our smartphones afflicting us all with symptoms of ADHD?
https://theconversation.com/are-our-smartphones-afflicting-us-all-with-symptoms-of-adhd-58330

The inability to "do analysis" or for deep thought may well simply be a symptom of the larger issue of attention-spreading (for lack of a better term). There seems to be a dichotomy between depth- vs. breadth-first attention at the root of the problem Sussman bemoaned. Us old people (well, geeks anyway) tend toward depth-first ... or at least depth-preferred ... attention, whereas the younger ones tend toward breadth-preference. You don't have to know _about_ the incident things, you only need to know _of_ them. You can have whole conversations simply mentioning various things without discussing any single thing in any depth.

There's a deep theme, here somewhere ... oops, my phone just dinged.

On 05/09/2016 04:26 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> If you have a closure over the whole universe and you are given one knob to turn, and once doing so out pops a new projection of the world you can see, then you 1) don't necessarily see the whole universe, but 2) can potentially be a specialist in the things that are observable in that projection. The part I don’t like in this picture is that the niche-fillers start to fancy the idea there are different universes popping out the closure and see no need to reconcile them. They see N vectors instead of one eigenvector.

--
⛧ glen

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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gepr

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

On 05/11/2016 06:45 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Most us have to stay on top of things, though. Hopefully, though, it is not the only thing.

I wonder about the use of the word "have". A particular person with whom I'm currently forced to interact, keeps his nose stuck in his phone and ear buds in his ears all day every day. He claims he _has_ to do this because if he doesn't he grows anxious ... to the extent of panic attacks. He claims he needs constant stimulus for his emotional well-being. It's akin to the fasting experiments I started recently. Prior to those experiments, I thought I _had_ to eat every day. I felt like I got "hangry", as Renee's co-workers call it, where "low blood sugar" made one irritable. But by purposefully denying myself food for growing amounts of time, I discovered that I was simply addicted to my habits ... stuck in my comfort zone. I now believe the evidence (which I've always known about, but ignored) that people (including me) can live just fine for quite awhile without food.

I wonder how many of us who have to stay on top of things, are similarly addicted.

But then again, head hunters are not knocking down my door looking for expertise in things like Mean.io, either. 8^)

--
⛧ glen

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

What I meant here is that in organizations there is a difference between what is true and what is valued. So "staying on top of things" is knowing random valued things in that instant. Someone can escalate or build consensus around a goal up the ranks, and now they will protect that goal even if it isn't worth protecting. In this situation, the consensus building process is just one of susceptible individuals adding to momentum (e.g. out of fear or ambition), not one where more eyes and brains perform something like peer review. One can make a living as a manager just watching things escalate an deescalate, and learn nothing about the world in the process. Same sort of wasted motion in fashion or popular music or the world of celebrity.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2016 9:42 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

On 05/11/2016 06:45 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Most us have to stay on top of things, though. Hopefully, though, it is not the only thing.

I wonder about the use of the word "have". A particular person with whom I'm currently forced to interact, keeps his nose stuck in his phone and ear buds in his ears all day every day. He claims he _has_ to do this because if he doesn't he grows anxious ... to the extent of panic attacks. He claims he needs constant stimulus for his emotional well-being. It's akin to the fasting experiments I started recently. Prior to those experiments, I thought I _had_ to eat every day. I felt like I got "hangry", as Renee's co-workers call it, where "low blood sugar" made one irritable. But by purposefully denying myself food for growing amounts of time, I discovered that I was simply addicted to my habits ... stuck in my comfort zone. I now believe the evidence (which I've always known about, but ignored) that people (including me) can live just fine for quite awhile without food.

I wonder how many of us who have to stay on top of things, are similarly addicted.

But then again, head hunters are not knocking down my door looking for expertise in things like Mean.io, either. 8^)

--
⛧ glen

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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gepr

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

OK. But that doesn't change the fact that "have to" is too strong. It would be better phrased "Most of us want to stay on top of things." In the end, of course, as we get old and fade away[*], we simply cannot keep up with things, which leads to complaining about how the world is developing. Even those who authentically try as hard as they can to either ensure their values are valued or at least to keep up with where the value lies will eventually fail. The trick is whether, as they're failing, they continue to complain ... perhaps in the mistaken belief that their complaining helps. I.e. Get off my lawn!

The wise ones will realize they do not _have_ to keep up, despite however much they may want to. And, those will also be the least likely to complain as they fade away.

[*] Yes, many of us can successfully "jockey" from one role to another as our skills shift from "fast reflexes" to "wisdom of age". But even the most successful jockeys eventually fade away.

On 05/11/2016 09:05 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> What I meant here is that in organizations there is a difference between what is true and what is valued. So "staying on top of things" is knowing random valued things in that instant. Someone can escalate or build consensus around a goal up the ranks, and now they will protect that goal even if it isn't worth protecting. In this situation, the consensus building process is just one of susceptible individuals adding to momentum (e.g. out of fear or ambition), not one where more eyes and brains perform something like peer review. One can make a living as a manager just watching things escalate an deescalate, and learn nothing about the world in the process. Same sort of wasted motion in fashion or popular music or the world of celebrity.

--
⛧ glen

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

" [*] Yes, many of us can successfully "jockey" from one role to another as our skills shift from "fast reflexes" to "wisdom of age". But even the most successful jockeys eventually fade away."

If anything I'm more breadth oriented than I used to be. It's more a like a cash flow thing. I know I'll have to jettison a lot of attention and short/medium term memory to do depth, and so I try to find opportunities to schedule the attention in batch. As a young person, I'd run out of cash, so to speak, and be in a world of hurt. Now I collect a nice pile of cash, figuratively and literally, before jumping in. The ongoing negotiation with the people around me gets replaced with what amounts to a monetary transaction to keep them at a bay for a while. Knuth (or some favorite novelist, etc.), in contrast, had such a giant pile of (intellectual) cash he could keep people at bay, period. The "reflexes" are no worse, from age, and maybe better, but I'm not going to work 30 hours straight anymore because that's just stupid.
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gepr

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

Very nice! I wish I were a bit more able to stockpile either cash or attention. I'm a bit too impulsive for either. I do make an attempt at logging "ideas worth pursuing". I even prioritize them to some extent. But my process has always depended on "more than one motivation" to pursue any given subject. I.e. I don't invest deeply in anything until it's reinforced by lots of nudges/patterns. Hence my apophenia, which turns out to be motivated reasoning.

On 05/11/2016 11:08 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> If anything I'm more breadth oriented than I used to be. It's more a like a cash flow thing. I know I'll have to jettison a lot of attention and short/medium term memory to do depth, and so I try to find opportunities to schedule the attention in batch. As a young person, I'd run out of cash, so to speak, and be in a world of hurt. Now I collect a nice pile of cash, figuratively and literally, before jumping in. The ongoing negotiation with the people around me gets replaced with what amounts to a monetary transaction to keep them at a bay for a while. Knuth (or some favorite novelist, etc.), in contrast, had such a giant pile of (intellectual) cash he could keep people at bay, period. The "reflexes" are no worse, from age, and maybe better, but I'm not going to work 30 hours straight anymore because that's just stupid.

--
⛧ glen

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

If an apophany is arises from abnormal overfitting of environmental information, perhaps a necessary but not sufficient condition to an epiphany is psychopathy? A bold motivational driver toward a hypothesis and experiment. :-)

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2016 3:05 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

Very nice! I wish I were a bit more able to stockpile either cash or attention. I'm a bit too impulsive for either. I do make an attempt at logging "ideas worth pursuing". I even prioritize them to some extent. But my process has always depended on "more than one motivation" to pursue any given subject. I.e. I don't invest deeply in anything until it's reinforced by lots of nudges/patterns. Hence my apophenia, which turns out to be motivated reasoning.

On 05/11/2016 11:08 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> If anything I'm more breadth oriented than I used to be. It's more a like a cash flow thing. I know I'll have to jettison a lot of attention and short/medium term memory to do depth, and so I try to find opportunities to schedule the attention in batch. As a young person, I'd run out of cash, so to speak, and be in a world of hurt. Now I collect a nice pile of cash, figuratively and literally, before jumping in. The ongoing negotiation with the people around me gets replaced with what amounts to a monetary transaction to keep them at a bay for a while. Knuth (or some favorite novelist, etc.), in contrast, had such a giant pile of (intellectual) cash he could keep people at bay, period. The "reflexes" are no worse, from age, and maybe better, but I'm not going to work 30 hours straight anymore because that's just stupid.

--
⛧ glen

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

gepr

Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

Ha! Excellent. All we need is a way to continually measure the neural correlates to psychopathy and stick the devices to a 2-arm cohort.

--
⛧ glen

On May 11, 2016 6:08 PM, "Marcus Daniels" <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> If an apophany is arises from abnormal overfitting of environmental information, perhaps a necessary but not sufficient condition to an epiphany is psychopathy? A bold motivational driver toward a hypothesis and experiment. :-)

uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen